Disaster recovery and/or backup support is commonly provided in computing systems to maintain business continuity. In one environment, a secondary site serves as a backup when the primary site is unavailable for use by customers. Examples of causes for unavailability include disasters, catastrophes, shutting down for maintenance, hardware failure, application failure and so on. Unfortunately, in many situations, the whole primary site is deemed unavailable to customers even if a small portion of resources in that site is unavailable. The secondary site can require almost or even the same resources as the primary site.
Known conventional file transfer methods and systems are based on a manual approach (for example, FTO or email) according to which the user must determine which files need to be transferred in which directions. Some file transfer systems are proprietary and work only with particular hardware combinations and unknown levels of transport security. Most of the conventional techniques are device specific, require significant configuration and are hardware-storage based solutions, which are high-end and expensive. At application level, many of the conventional techniques or architecture frameworks that cannot help detect disaster scenarios and notify appropriately. Further, in integrated systems like operations support systems (OSSs), which typically have geographically distributed applications that are tightly integrated, only customized solutions appear to exist to handle such disaster scenarios. In addition, current hardware implemented techniques can either provide a complete switch over or no switch over in case of a disaster. They do not provide a feature for a partial switch over in case of a disaster as they are based on a single configuration file. Further, the current techniques do not provide switch over in case of planned system outages.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a cost effective solution that is not hardware-storage based solutions to handle disaster scenarios that minimizes disruptions to end-users in an enterprise IT companies. There is also a need for “System Integrated” subsystems running in a heterogeneous environment (hardware and OS/vendor neutral solution). Furthermore, the subsystem can be a single application or a set of applications running on single/multiple servers. Further, there is also a need for a disaster technique that can work without any limitation on distance between two sites, i.e., distance between primary and secondary. Furthermore, there is also a need to support planned or unplanned (disaster) outage of sub-system to run at a specific location that needs to be detected and restarted at the other location. Moreover, there is also a need for support subsystem level switchover to alternate site, keeping integration between components intact. In addition, there is also a need for the support subsystem disaster recovery to work with minimum functionality and data loss.